Congrats to 6th Grade Girls BB Team

Operation Sandy-Stash

Tue, 12/11/2012 - 2:10pm — Staff Reporter

The week before Thanksgiving, Mr. Wieting and Mr. Krall challenged the Lincoln Lutheran middle school students to provide help for the families that were devastated by Hurricane Sandy. As part of the challenge, Mr. Krall and Mr. Wieting would grow mustaches if the students raised $500 and $750 respectively. If they somehow managed to raise $2000, the rest of the male faculty would also grow mustaches. Operation Sandy-Stash was born.

The Lincoln Lutheran community responded with enthusiasm, and in a little over a week blew past all goals. With donations of cash, gift cards and other items, and help from Lincoln Rent-A-Van and U-Haul with donations of vehicles to use for the trip East, over $17,000 was raised. Mr. Wieting stated, “There were a lot of generous donations made. I think this was different than donating to someplace like the Red Cross because they knew the affiliation and they got to see pictures and see exactly what they were working for.” The three main types of items that were donated were clothes, toiletry items and nonperishable food. The 6th grade students then went about the task of carefully documenting all of the donations and their value before helping to load them into the van and trailer.

God moves through people’s hearts in many different ways. For Mr. Bob Krall and Mr. Sean Wieting, they believed their calling was to go to the Church of Grace and Peace in Toms River, New Jersey over Thanksgiving Break. This church sacrificed their time, money and volunteers to serve those who were devastated by Hurricane Sandy. According to Mr. Wieting, he felt in his heart that this is what the Spirit needed him to do.

It took the Sandy-Stash crew a total of 26 hours to get there due to some unplanned dense fog. They were then put onto different teams and went out and helped families in need. As far as the impact this had on Mr. Wieting's life, he said “The biggest thing for me was the experience that it has on young people. I have the desire to get young people to go places and see how well we have it. It puts people into perspective.” The Lincoln Lutheran family thanks all who contributed to this project, and ultimately, who helped to share the love of Christ with those affected by Hurricane Sandy.

Want to know more? The Journal Star wrote a nice article on the whole operation.